Ability to Measure Store Visits Across Nearly 2,000 Businesses Now Freely Available through Placed Insights

Placed is making its location analytics platform, Placed Insights, available to the public at no cost. Launched in 2013, and utilized by hundreds of users across various industries including brick and mortar retail and restaurants, Placed Insights maps the real-world relationships between people and places.

“In the same way that Zillow’s Zestimate brought home value analytics to the masses, this evolution of Placed Insights will do the same for location analytics,” said David Shim, Founder and CEO at Placed. “We see very high demand for location analytics, yet adoption has been tempered by accessibility and cost to access an accurate and robust data set. Placed is taking the unprecedented step of education and investment in the industry by making location analytics available to all at no cost.”

Powered by 800 billion raw locations, 2.8 billion directly measured visits, and 94 million audited visits, Placed Insights to date has been a premium and paid service. With the announcement today, Placed is removing those barriers around Placed Insights, and open-sourcing access to one of the largest and most robust location analytics solutions in-market. Accessing Placed Insights is as simple as visiting placed.com, and entering any one of 1,900 businesses to garner robust location insights at no cost.

“When it comes to understanding the offline behavior of consumers, Placed is one of Taco Bell’s trusted partner,” said Lynn Hemans, Senior Director of Business and Social Intelligence. “Since partnering in 2016, Placed has been able to provide location analytics at a scale and accuracy that allows Taco Bell to take action against the data. In the past year, using Placed Attribution and Insights, Taco Bell has been able to deliver and optimize communication across media channels based on visitation.”

“Placed is a preferred location analytics and in-store attribution partner because of the scale of their privacy-compliant audience and the insights we uncover through their insights dashboard and cross-platform measurement solutions,” said Michele Siravo, VP, Managing Director, WHERE, at Horizon Media, Inc. “Access to Placed Insights has enabled us to enrich our strategic planning with location data – their foot traffic statistics are among a number of KPIs we ingest into Horizon’s proprietary data-driven integrated marketing platform, InfuseSM. Placed’s bold decision to open up its platform is an exciting opportunity for brands and agencies to gain a deeper understanding of their customers.”

The open-sourced version of Placed Insights will update on a monthly basis starting with January 2018. Insights generated from the platform include:

In addition to Placed Insights (Public, and Premium), Placed’s suite of products include Attribution, measuring the impact of ads on store visits, and Audience, enabling activation based on offline consumer behaviors.

Placed’s Top 100 monthly rankings of most visited businesses has been published for January 2017. The top categories to experience a climb in rankings this month include Automotive, Gas Stations, and QSR’s. Enterprise rose 17 spots to the 100th most visited business in January, whereas Sonic, Dairy Queen, and Valero each climbed 16 spots.

Dairy Queen, in addition to Baskin-Robbins (which increased by 15 ranking points) should be no surprise this month, as January marked the 18th warmest one on record in 123 years in the contiguous US.

Chevrolet Dealers and Ford Dealers, which each rose 11 spots and 9 spots respectively, experienced growth in foot traffic as January is tagged a favorable month to buy the most recent models of cars–sales are typically slow, and manufactures increase the price tag as the year goes on.

In terms of the biggest hits in rankings this month, the 25 businesses that experienced the largest drop in rankings all spanned the Retail category, a predictable trend given the end of the holiday shopping season. Retail businesses that declined the least in January 2017 rankings include The Home Depot, Dollar Tree, and the UPS Store, which each only dropped one spot from December. The 10 businesses to experience the largest declines on the list can be found below:

Placed’s Top 100 monthly business list, ranked by highest in-store foot traffic, is now available for December 2016. Due to the prominent season of buying and giving in December, the majority of this month’s big movers fell under the Shopping category. 37 businesses in total experienced an increase in ranking, 78% of which were Retail businesses. Only four businesses in the Food & Beverage category experienced upward movement on the list: Chili’s, Olive Garden, Panda Express, and Buffalo Wild Wings.

The idea that offline retail is certainly not dead rang particularly true this month, especially for Clothing & Apparel stores, as five of these businesses climbed at least 20 spots in ranking: Express jumped 35 spots (previously, Express ranked 123 in November and did not even make last month’s top 100 list), followed by increases in Hot Topic (+32 spots), Forever 21 (+25 spots), Victoria’s Secret (+22 spots), and Dick’s Sporting Goods (+20 spots).

In terms of the biggest hits in rankings this month, Dairy Queen’s rank continues to dwindle with the warm weather, followed by several Gas Station and Restaurant (QSR and Fast Casual) businesses declining relatively in December. Although holiday travel was predicted to reach the highest level on record this year, Thanksgiving 2016 alone was set to be the busiest for travel in nine years. The rankings show that travel by road was stronger in November than December, as Chevron dropped 12 spots, while Mobil experienced a decrease of ten spots, and BP a decline of nine rankings.

View the full rankings for December here and lookout for the first official top business list of 2017 movers and shakers next month.

November’s Top 100 Business Ranking List has been released by Placed. Based on in-store foot traffic measured through Placed’s 2.5 million user audience, this month’s list is a crucial one given the onset of the holiday shopping season. Typical of this time of year, 13 of the 15 businesses with the largest jump in store visit rank were retailers. The biggest climbers in rankings include Gap (+16 spots), Bath And Body Works (+15), J.C.Penney, Victoria’s Secret, and Macy’s (all +11 spots each).